When I was working on my
first book, I spent some time reading a series of 1930s-era reports from “Jeanes
teachers”, African men and women who were hired by the Rhodesian state
and a private American foundation to train other Africans in agriculture and
domesticity. I’m paraphrasing something that one of the teachers wrote
with evident frustration after many of her child-care lessons were rejected
by the women in her assigned area: “They say that none of their grannies
did these things and yet here they all are. What am I to say to that?”

We have to be mindful that
such assertions about “tradition” were part of fast-moving, highly
mobile cultural and social struggles in colonial southern Africa. My own interpretation
of the Jeanes teachers’ reports is that their assigned subjects were not
so much objecting to the teachings as much as the teachers, that older men and
women resented the authority of young, educated men and women who were not locals.
But also the locals were in many cases pragmatically noticing that some of the
advice being dispensed was of questionable value. Not just Jeanes teachers but
all variety of European and European-educated African missionaries and teachers,
for example, persistently suggested that living in square houses was better
than living in round houses. The square house was a symbol for them of a “civilizing
process”, of a transformation of their subjects. Showing skepticism about
that project strikes me as simple common sense: most of the rural villagers
must have seen how arbitrary and purely symbolic this counsel was.

There is something about
the entire global practice of modern social reform and its relationship to both
civil society and the nation-state that inspires or ought to inspire similar
appropriate skepticism everywhere. I was initially inclined in my work on these
questions in African history to identify this skepticism with colonialism, but
once I worked on the history of controversies over children’s television,
I began to see some larger patterns, and now see better still.

I’ve been
minded of this from reading Laura
at 11D discuss Mary Eberstadt’s Home-Alone America , a book
which I’ve now taken a look at myself, though much less diligently and
superficially than Laura. Laura's excellent critique pretty much speaks for
my own reaction. What I’d like to observe is that the sins of Eberstadt
are common, and moreover, tend to recur on both the right and left ends of the
political spectrum. They are most marked when the discussion is about children,
childhood, domesticity and the family. The problem isn’t just the very
weak kind of social science that Laura accurately nails—the confusion
about correlation and causation—but something deeper as well.

The deeper problem is even
found in much more respectable, careful kinds of social science. It’s
roughly the same problem that Deirdre McCloskey has identified in a number of
writings about economics: that the “secret sin” of economics is
its sleight-of-hand when it comes to its claims about the significance of a
given problem or finding. Significance gets reduced to statistical significance,
but making a philosophically or politically vigorous argument about the relative
importance of a particular problem gets outsourced as being somebody else’s
problem.

This is in some
ways what African men and women in 1930s Southern Rhodesia were saying to the
Jeanes teacher. Not necessarily, “I don’t believe you when you say
that this or that thing that we do is a problem,” but “I don’t
believe that the problem, if it exists, is a very important one. I think that
what you want us to do instead is more hassle than it is worth”. When
you look carefully at a great many studies and books that claim to diagnose
pressing social or public problems, you frequently find that the evidence at
hand, even when it is much more carefully arranged than Eberstadt’s, suggests
that the “effect size” of the problem is very small.

In many ways, this
kind of social criticism aims to tackle huge, complex problems that it acknowledges
to be huge and complex by acts of incremental subtraction. Take away one small
contributing factor, the implicit argument goes, and you reduce the general
problem by that much. But huge social problems, even when almost all of us concede
that the problem is real and significant, don’t work that way. They’re
not giant agglomerations of smaller problems which can be neatly pulled out
of the overall mess.

Besides that, however, most
general social critics, left and right, neglect to make the really foundational
arguments that they need to make about why we should care about the problems
they claim to identify. Let’s suppose Eberstadt is right and day care
is a major contributing factor to childhood obesity. I think Laura very clearly
demonstrates why we shouldn’t take her too seriously on this point, but
let’s be generous and assume it’s so. The real job is telling me
why I should care about that. So what if kids get fat? So what if people die
ten or twenty years earlier than they should? So what if people are more sedentary
when they’re alive? And so on.

Yes, you can make some consequentialist
arguments about all those “so whats”, and some of them are pretty
substantial. But even the substantial ones require some very profound assumptions
about the nature and purpose of society and about the moral obligations we owe
one another—or the practical needs we have. Eberstadt, coming from the
right, is typically inconsistent in her understanding of the application of
such public welfare arguments—but then, so too are many intellectuals
and public figures on the left. You cannot simply assume that childhood obesity
is a bad thing, or rattle off a bunch of secondary effects (say, for example,
more car usage, hence more fuel usage, hence more pollution or dependence on
foreign oil) as if those are Q.E.D. on the general point. There are deeper foundations
to lay down first. They can be done simply by referencing various bodies of
social theory, but you have to do it. Most social critics in the public sphere
can’t be bothered, or don’t even seem to know what they’re
missing.

That’s one thing that
economics can sometimes be awfully good at—asking a question like, “Why
do we assume it’s a bad thing if people die from smoking cigarettes? Can
we prove that it is?”, questions that other viewpoints have a hard time
asking with equanimity. Economics may not be very capable of providing the philosophically
coherent argument about why that is bad or good, but at least it can observe
that things commonly assumed to be good may not be so even in purely evidentiary
terms. Sometimes the change between one set of social practices and another
set of social practices can’t be reduced to a simple matter of good and
bad. So kids used to walk home and their mommies were waiting for them there
and they used to play together in the neighborhood and so on. Let’s say
that all is true. So now they go to day care and see their mommies at night
and their mommies work. How we experience and evaluate that change, which seems
a real change, if exaggerated in some respects by Eberstadt, is nothing that
can be boiled down to concretized evidence anyway. You can’t find a moral
argument about that change by nattering about with things like obesity or attention-deficit
disorder. Those are red herrings. If you want to make a moral argument, make
it, and leave the statistics for people who know what statistics are and what
they can and cannot be made to do.

Oh, yes, many of
us experience regret, longing, confusion, angst about that change—or any
of the other changes that end up being superficially dissected by well-meaning
social critics on the left and right. That’s why there is a market for
such social criticism. Many of us are looking for someone to tell us that our
longing for our own history is more than just us, that it is right and proper
that our childhoods, our past families, our past worlds, are the ones which
should be the model forever forward. That the cultural and social worlds that
we have known—even when our own personal familial lives as children were
not pleasant--is what should be. We are not prepared to hear that the very legitimate
feelings of longing and loss and confusion that we personally experience are
just that: our feelings, our lives caught in history, and nothing more. That
to become strangers to the present is our inevitable destiny. We should not
merely accept that no matter what: some things in the worlds we knew are precious,
and must be saved or translated into the future. That effort requires extraordinary
arguments, because it takes extraordinary resources and will to deliberately
change the forward drift of social change.

Most of the time, we should
just accept that what we were is not what we are or will be. That humans are
resilient, and children most of all. Our children will be ok in day care, or
at home, just as we were ok with the range of things done for us and to us when
we were children. That this change, though wrenching and complex to us personally,
is likely to be value-neutral when you think about the big picture of how humans
survive, thrive and are fulfilled. Just as the mothers and fathers in small
African villages in 1930s Rhodesia observed, however they themselves were reared,
they were there. Whether a child was bathed this way or that way was a thing
to consider, but not at the level of incessant urgency that some well-meaning
stranger might vest in it.

So much of this
angst, from Eberstadt or many other commentators, is about the most confusing
and difficult fact of human life: our children will not be us. Modern middle-class
Americans are more confused than most about this fact. We hope our children
will be better than us. We hope that they will be us. We fear that they will
be worse than us. But we are not prepared to relax and deal with the truth:
that most of the time they will be nothing more or less than different. That
children are both alienation from as well as connection to the present, and
that this is neither good nor bad. It simply is.